Wisconsin hate groups, hate crime hard to track
White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" clash with counter-protesters as they enter Lee Park during the "Unite the Right" rally Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. After clashes with anti-fascist protesters and police the rally was declared an unlawful gathering and people were forced out of Lee Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is slated to be removed.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
One national survey says nine hate groups are operating in Wisconsin, although the nature of such movements makes it difficult to know their scope or predict when they will come out of the shadows, experts say.
The hatred that spawned a white nationalist rally and led to a counterprotester's death last weekend isn’t unique to Charlottesville, Virginia, although it typically takes a subtler form than burning crosses and filling streets with chanting zealots.
Wisconsin hasn’t had a significant public hate rally since 2011, when a neo-Nazi gathering in West Allis drew just 30 supremacists and about 2,000 counterprotesters.
But in basements and bars and online message boards, the mindset festers, said Stanislav Vysotsky, assistant professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
“It’s hard to identify because there’s no public face to it,” he said. “There’s no really easy way to gauge what that underground looks like.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups nationwide, identifies nine such organizations that are active in Wisconsin, of which five are neo-Nazi or white nationalist. But a USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin investigation two years ago identified five other groups with a presence here as well.
Those five include the National Socialist Movement, which is trying to organize a “BBQ meet and greet” in Eau Claire next month, according to a posting this week on a prominent white supremacist forum. Another is the American Freedom Party, which tried to organize a chapter on the UW-Madison campus earlier this year. The chapter would have been spearheaded by a 33-year-old student who spent five years in prison for burning two predominantly black churches in Milwaukee and Lansing, Mich.
One former white power activist said the groups themselves are often dysfunctional — fighting about what patches to wear, what flags to fly — but they are dangerous because of the violent people who draw inspiration and direction from them.
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“These people are really whipping themselves into a frenzy, and it leads to the Dylann Roofs and Wade Pages of the world killing people,” said Arno Michaelis, a Milwaukee native who became a leader in the movement but later reformed and wrote a book on his transformation.
Roof is a white supremacist sentenced to death for killing nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, and Page is a 40-year-old white-power musician who gunned down six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012.
Milwaukee Police Sgt. Timothy Gauerke, the department spokesman, said in an email to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that hate groups rarely are publicly active together, so the agency "monitors social media and other sources for individuals who may pose a threat to public safety based on affiliation with hate groups and other factors.”
A 2012 Sikh temple shooting was the highest-profile hate crime in Wisconsin in recent memory, but it’s far from an isolated incident for the state.
Buy PhotoMargarita Renteria, of Stevens Point, holds up a sign "Stop Hate" during a youth-led rally "A Hate Crime Is A Crime" Saturday, March 18, 2017, at the Goerke Field in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. (Photo: T'xer Zhon Kha/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)
In May, an 80-year-old Portage County man was charged with recklessly endangering safety, with a hate-crime penalty enhancer, for allegedly firing a gun near his Hmong neighbors. The case is still pending against Henry Kaminski, who told police he “had problems with Hmongs” and thought they were criminals.
The Jewish Community Center in Whitefish Bay was forced to close four times from January to March for bomb threats, part of a wave of such threats nationwide.
Michaelis, who now runs a Milwaukee nonprofit emphasizing unity, Serve 2 Unite, said hate groups have appeal to people who feel traumatized and excluded, offering them an outlet for their frustration.
"The recruitment process is the same thing (for any hate group)," said Michaelis, who joined the ranks as a 17-year-old in Milwaukee. "It’s, 'Join us. You can do something about this, you can make the world a better place, you can strike a blow for the good guys against the bad guys, and most importantly, you’ll be a hero, you’ll be worth something. People will respect you. They’ll fear you.'"
Hate crimes hard to track
Officials struggle to quantify the prevalence of hate crimes because record-keeping has been inconsistent and victims have not always been willing to report incidents.
Police statistics reported to the Wisconsin Department of Justice and FBI imply hate crimes are rare in Wisconsin in relation to other types of violence: 41 were recorded in 2016 and an average of 48 annually over the last five years.
But experts say that data drastically understates the frequency because it relies on police to identify and categorize crimes as related to hate or bias.
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(Photo: Morry Gash, AP)
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics — based on a phone survey conducted on a nationally representative sample of households — estimated the number of hate crimes nationwide at 250,000 in 2015. That’s almost 50 times higher than the national total reported by the FBI that year.
“The majority of bias crimes are … intimidation and simple assaults. One punch, threats, things of that nature – if you are a victim of something like that there are a lot of reasons you might not want to report it,” said Vysotsky, the UW-Whitewater professor. “If a community doesn’t feel like they’re supported by police for one reason or another, then they’re less likely to report a bias crime because they don’t think it’s going to be taken seriously.”
The city of Milwaukee reported just five hate crimes to the FBI in 2015.
“There’s a resistance to do that, to not have a city be classified as a place where hate crimes happen,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces De La Frontera, a Hispanic advocacy group in Milwaukee. “But it’s important to classify these as hate crimes because it’s sending a very strong message that there is accountability for racially motivated crimes, that it’s not acceptable.”
Gender left out of Wisconsin hate crimes
The definition of a hate crime also varies among states, although skin color and ethnicity is consistently the most common bias involved.
The 2012-2016 Wisconsin data shows that 71 percent of reported hate crimes were motivated by bias against race or ethnicity (typically against black victims), 20 percent by sexual orientation and the rest by religion, disability and gender. The Bureau of Justice Statistics report also listed race and ethnicity as being the most common perceived motivations behind hate crimes.
Wisconsin statute establishes enhanced penalties for crimes that target victims based on “race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry.” Wisconsin law does not define hate crimes as broadly as some other states, because it does not include gender or gender identity. A 2016 report by the Anti-Defamation League says 30 states include gender in hate crime legislation, and 16 states include gender identity.
That penalty enhancer isn’t consistently used by prosecutors because it requires them to prove intent.
There is no hate crime enhancer on homicide charges against a Milwaukee man awaiting trial for allegedly killing three neighbors in March 2016, reportedly based on their nationality. A criminal complaint said Dan J. Popp asked a Hispanic father and son where they were from as they passed his apartment, and then said “You guys got to go” moments later as he killed the man. He also is accused of killing an Asian couple in front of their children.
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